Froggles!

When I accepted a bucket of frogspawn from English Folkfan back in Spring, I did not anticipate just how attached I would get to my little plague of frogs a few months later. But here I am now, worrying about them all as they head off to find their places in the big wide world.

Late last Summer, we sank an old bathtub into a flowerbed by our hedge (after sealing the plug hole) and started a wildlife pond. I threw in a selection of rocks and plants, installed a plank to help anything that fell in to get back out again, introduced six pond snails to help with the algae, and largely hoped for the best.

90% of the plant life made it through the Winter, and so did most of the snails (I found one empty shell on the side of the pond – I blame the Blackbirds) and then English Folkfan offered us some frogspawn and I couldn’t resist.

Cue many weeks of me daily checking on the spawn anxiously waiting to see if they survived the transfer. Most of them did and I think I drove Caius and the kids a bit bananas squeaking over every single developmental stage they went through – the black dots in the eggs slowly turning into apostrophes, then gaining external gills and more definite tails as they slowly left their jelly homes and moved into the water proper, then absorbing their gills and growing ever chunkier, getting a bit of froggy colouring, developing their back legs and then front legs, losing their tails and eventually turning into an army of the cutest tiniest froglets that you ever did see.

I loved them all they way through this cycle – even treating them to blobs of cat food to help them grow (okay, so mostly I did that because there were just so many of them and I knew the big ones would eat the smaller ones if they couldn’t find any other food and I wanted to prevent cannibalism as much as possible…)

And now it is late August and there are a few (massive!) tadpoles lurking at one end of the bath, a decent handful of teeeeeeny froglets sheltering in the pond plants, and all the rest appear to be venturing off into the garden to hunt down tasty bugs and find themselves places to lurk for the coming seasons…

…and giving me heart attacks whilst I try to mow the lawn. I don’t want to accidentally run them over!

Luckily they tend to start hopping before I get too close, so I am taking forever and ever to get the lawn cut as I am picking them up and moving them to safety as I go.

On the one hand I am SO PROUD of them all for going out and finding their way in the world, but on the other hand I would really rather they stayed in and around the pond where I’m far less likely to accidentally massacre them and be guilty about it forever.

I am hopeful that some of my plague will return next Spring to have babies of their own, so that I can dote on them all over again. Turns out I really quite like froggles.